Crossing the River

    The book of Joshua is a bit troubling, if you think about it at all.  It is the story of what happens to the Israelite people once they have finished their forty-year trek through the Sinai desert, and make it to the promised land, and find themselves transitioning into life in the land flowing with milk and honey.

    But in order to settle in amid all that milk and honey, the Israelites, now led by Joshua, must first displace the people who are already living in Canaan, and by displace, I mean slaughter.  The book of Joshua reads like a divinely-mandated order to kill all the people in the land who were there first.  That’s troubling on a lot of levels.

    We don’t need to look very far back into our own nation’s history to have a sense of what that means.  In order for the British colonists who became Americans to fulfill their manifest destiny, they first had to deal with the indigenous people who were here. While there  might not have been divinely-mandated, wholesale slaughter, the western expansion was a brutal factor in the lives of those we now call Native Americans.  It’s an aspect of our history we have to confess, and I’m pretty sure reservations and casinos are not an adequate atonement.

    But with the book of Joshua, we might get a little bit of a reprieve.  Archeological work over the last half century has shown that there is no evidence to support a massive invasion by a foreign people, a conquest that included slaughter; the evidence shows rather that one of the indigenous peoples became more dominant, through a rather peaceful and gradual social change.

    Still the question lingers: why glorify a bloody history?  Why make something up?

    As human beings, we have the tendency to amplify our histories, make them a little shinier or more dramatic or more noble than they are.  Think about the apocryphal tale of the young George Washington chopping down the cherry tree with his lovely new hatchet, who, when confronted, admits  his mistake because he cannot tell a lie.  I’m pretty sure that story has no basis in fact, but was told to enhance the reputation of our nation’s first president.

    We tell stories rather than recount history because we’re trying to make a point.  Our nation was first led by a great man.  God was on the side of the Israelites and by divine force would help them claim the land that God was giving them.

    Perhaps it would be helpful to consider that the story of Joshua, and in particular the section we read from chapter 3, is a story not of a historical conquest but a foundational story about identity.  Who are these people who no longer wander in the desert, and whose are they? Who are these people, now that the promise God made to them forty years ago has been fulfilled?

    They are people who have journeyed with God for forty years.  They are people for whom God parted the waters of the Red Sea as they left slavery, and people for whom God now parts the waters of the Jordan River as they become inhabitants in the land called Israel.  They are people whose lives have been redeemed by a faithful God.

 They are people who now belong to a land that God promised their ancestor Abraham thousands of years earlier.  And in their national/theological/religious understanding (which cannot be separated), that land is the physical reminder of the promise God fulfilled, the foundation of their identity, and the source of their joy.

    We have a different theological identity, which is different from our religious identity, which is different from our national identity.  Our religious identity is not rooted in a divinely-promised place.  Our religious identity is more spiritual in nature, tied not so much to a place but, for Christians, to the person of Jesus Christ.

    Just before he began his ministry, Jesus, too, came to the banks of the Jordan.  He did not cross the river, but plunged down deep into it, baptized by John.  He emerged wet and dripping and claimed by God who said, “This is my beloved son.”

    Those of us who have been baptized at some point were brought or came to a metaphorical Jordan.  Like Jesus, we were plunged into those waters, and were reminded of the claim God made on us.  Our baptisms, our coming to the Jordan are foundational, they say something about who we are and whose we are.

    The Book of Order has some lovely things to say about baptism: “Baptism signifies the faithfulness of God, the washing away of sin, rebirth, putting on the fresh garment of Christ, being sealed by God’s spirit, adoption into the covenant family of Christ, and resurrection and illumination in Christ.”  That’s a lot to pack into one sacrament. 

With all that going on, it should feel like the world has been turned upside down.  But for many of us who do remember our baptism, there was no cataclysmic epiphany.  We went into the water, or the pastor sprinkled a little on our head, and it didn’t feel as though anything happened.  Life went on, we dried off, got the certificate, and went on with our day.

    But I do believe that something significant happens at baptism.  God has claimed us, and at our baptism, that claim is made public and affirmed by the community.  We affirm that God’s promise to us cannot be undone.  Nothing we do, nothing that is done to us can undo that promise.  In baptism, God makes a claim, and the congregation does, too.  The congregation, in a way, claims the life of the person being baptized.  The congregation promises to love that baby, to nurture that confirmand, to welcome that adult, and if this were a perfect world, nothing would ever undo the congregation’s promise, either.  We affirm that we belong together to God.

    I am learning that on the West Coast, and here in Portland, and here at Westminster, there is a suspicion at times of the communal; that the individual expression of faith or spirituality is much more important than a communal one.  To say “all Christians believe this or that” is to tie people up to a dogma they might not believe in or agree with.  Some people get itchy at the name of Jesus Christ.  Others capitalize even the adjectives that describe him, as a way to honor him.  Often it seems to me that the individual journey takes precedence.

    But folks, we are a community, and once in a while, we get to talk about our communal experience and our communal identity.  So this morning I’m going to step out a little, and say that there are things we hold in common.  We are called to life together, not life alone parallel to each other.  I’m going to say that this morning, every one of us is here because in some way, to some degree, we trust God.  And I know that right now there are some who are saying, “I don’t” and you will let me know that after the service. 

    We are here because we trust that God has made a claim on our lives, that God desires wholeness for us as individuals and as a community.  The degree to which we have that trust varies, but God’s claim on all of us is what holds us together.

    This morning five wonderful people are going to stand up in front and join us.  Their stories are as different from each other’s as night and day, but they share something in common: they found God, and later, in different ways, they found Westminster, and something about our communal identity drew them here till they were able to say, yes, I want to be a part of things here.

    I rejoice and give thanks for this community that God has called together. I give thanks for those saints who have left us and gone to God, for the new people who find their way to us, for children who grow up before our very eyes, for more gray hairs and bifocals, for young adults going off to college with our prayers.  I rejoice for who this community has been, and eagerly anticipate who we will be, by the grace of God.  Amen.


The Reverend Beth Neel
Westminster Presbyterian Church
October 30, 2011